Blood Magic Read Online Free PDF Page A

last poems.
    Formulas, algorithms and graphs
    Make for boredom not laughs I
    won’t need this stuff
    Whiskey’s enough
    To set me on the right paths
.
    And:
    Skanky girl with eyes
    Too heavy under powder
    Thinks I give a shit
    “That sounds like Sarah Turner,” Eric mused.
    “It was Western Civ this morning. She was pissed I wouldn’t talk to her. I didn’t even try to catch her name.”
    “So you want to be a poet?”
    “No.”
    Leaning back into his desk, he waited for me to continue. When I didn’t, Eric shook his head. “I hear poets get themselves a lot of tail.”
    We shared a grin. “Hey,” I said. “You know Silla Kennicot?”
    His face stilled, then the skin around his mouth tightened like he was trying not to frown. “Yeah. Why?”
    “She’s just my neighbor.” I shrugged, as if it didn’t matter.
    What the hell?
    “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. You meet her?”
    “Yeah. She seemed a bit odd.”
    He paused, flicking his lighter open again. “No kidding. Ever since her parents died, she’s been messed up.” Eric stopped. “Can’t blame her.”
    I was clearly supposed to ask for details. Instead I asked if he needed help with his homework. He replied that if he’d done it, he would.
    After class, Eric walked with me to my free period. As we passed a bulletin board, he paused and pointed at a neon orange flyer. MACBETH , it read, and WE NEED CREW! ALL THE GLORY, NONE OF THE MEMORIZATION! “You should come join up,” Eric said. “You don’t have to be liked to be on stage crew.”
    The river of students pressed me closer to the orange paper. At the very bottom, it said in tiny letters, SPONSORED BY THE RAZORBACK DRAMA CLUB. ERIC LEILENTHAL, ACTING PRESIDENT . “Acting president? You’re just pretending?” Frankly, Eric didn’t look the part. I’d put him in the home-fried baseball category.
    He pulled a pen out of his jeans pocket and scratched out the word
acting
. “That bitch.” Replacing the pen, he continued, “Wendy Cole keeps insisting we have a vote, but I was vice prez, and when the president gives up on you, the vice just steps in.”
    “Wow. Drama in drama club.”
    “Yeah, well, your girlfriend Silla is in the show. That make you want to come?” He sneered.
    I liked that Eric was kind of an asshole, too. And I needed something to do after school to avoid Lilith. “Sure. Where?”
    “After school, in the auditorium. Later, okay? I gotta find Wendy.”
    As he marched down the hallway, I thought,
Where the hell are they hiding an auditorium?
SILLA
    School rushed by in its usual blur. Since Saturday night, I’d spent every moment I could up in my bedroom, hunched over the spell book and reading it out loud the way I used to read scripts to memorize my lines. I read cover to cover, and then over again, brushing my fingers against the indentations my dad’s pen had made in the thick paper. The patterns swam in my imagination, and I could hear his voice:
Sympathetic magic works with our own associations. Quicken the tincture with a drop of blood. Draw poison out with fire, bind with red ribbons. Fresh beeswax is best for transformations. Drop of blood. Hint of blood. Cut. Sacrifice. Give
.
    So many questions I had for him. What does sympathetic magic mean? Why is ginger for burning curses away, and salt best for protection and neutral spells? What do you mean by
neutral
?
    It all intruded on my school day, memories pressing at me. Not just of reading, of Dad, but of the moment the magic had unfurled that dead leaf, and of Nicholas Pardee rising out of the shadows where he’d crouched like a goblin. They eclipsedthe video Mr. Edwards showed in AP History, and Physics lecture, and even Mrs. Sackville’s discussion on
The Return of the Native
. I tried to push all of it out of my mind and listen to Sackville’s questions about the nature of misfits and sexual identity, but everyone in my classes seemed pale and stony. They were mere gravestones, and only the magic was